Eisenach is a town which will always have
a special place in my heart, for a multiplicity of reasons. For one, it's where
I was married (and the authorities thoughtfully sent along someone to photograph
the proceedings, without us even having to ask). It's also a rather charming old
place, which despite its many important historical associations, is oddly unknown
in the English-speaking world.

Here is a quick crash course in the town's significance:

Bach was born here

it has one of Germany's most impressive medieval castles, Wartburg

it's here (in Wartburg castle) that Martin Luther first translated the bible
into German

it was home to the world-renowned Wartburg car factory (it wasn't exactly
well-known for the right reasons)

The old town is a significant size and mostly quite well preserved. A few bits on
the edge were left to rot then replaced by Plattenbau, but the rest hasn't been
fiddled with too much in the last century. Sadly, some of the villas on the Wartburg
side of town have been standing empty for years as arguments rage as to who exactly
the legal owner is. It has, ironically, caused many similar problems to the ones
arising from lack of investment from the DDR authorities - fine buildings crumbling
slowly to rubble.

On
the west east side of town there's a chunk of the old city wall slicing across Georgenstrasse.
But it's nothing that would keep out an agile 5-year old, let alone rampaging Austian/Bavarian/Prussian
armies. The only even vaguely convincing section is Karlstor (Karl's Tower), gateway
to the town's first significant square, Karlsplatz (formerly Platz der Deutsch-Sowjetischen
Freundschaft). The square is one of many spots in Eisenach of which I have eternal
recollections. Not many wedding parties leave the reception by bus, but it was a
pleasure accorded us. Our own very special wedding bendy-bus left from Platz DSF.

You can criticise the DDR regime for many things, but their stance on drink-driving
couldn't be faulted. The legal limit for alcohol in the blood was effectively nil
and the penalties (jail sentences in many cases) certainly acted as a deterrent
to irresponsible behaviour. No drunken guest stupid enough to drive us home, no
taxi to be found (check out the difference now - whole caravans at every taxi stand);
what else can you do but take the bus? It looks very romantic in "The Graduate",
bride in wedding dress (to be perfectly accurate, jilting bride in the film). Standing
amongst the shoppers in our ill-fitting suits (in my wife's case, beautiful white
dress) was a far more prosaic experience. Well, it would have been, if Dave hadn't
spotted the kiosk just by the busstop.

You can criticise the DDR regime for many things, but the general availability of
alcoholic drinks, in all strengths, under their governent couldn't be faulted. Quicker
than you could say "we're a bunch of alcoholics" we were all supplied
with miniatures, proper Nordhäuser, I think. The journey was an event for my
Bristish guests, not only because of the novelty of riding in an articulated bus.

To return from the world of notalgia to the more urbane one of disseminating information;
here is one tip for you all. I found a little free booklet called "Gastronomischer
Stadtbummel: Eiseneach und Umgebung" of great help. It's in both English and German,
which is very thoughtful. You should be able to pick it up at a hotel or the tourist
office:

Eisenacher Brauerei
In the town is the mid-sized (40,000 hl a year) Eisenacher Brauerei. It's very
central, on the big avenue that leads from town towards Wartburg castle. Some
of is rusticaly half-timbered, some industrial late 19th century brick and you
can see through big display windows to some of the coppers. There were a few lorries
hanging about, but I couldn't see much else going on. Maybe I was there on a slow
day.

I've
drunk beer from the brewery since 1987. In the early days, it was OK. The Helles
was a bit thin. Wartburg Pils was drinkable, but very unstable. If properly (and
quickly) tapped, it was quite a reasonable beer. Bottled, you needed to buy it
and drink it straight away. If you walked slowly, it could go sour before got
home. Perhaps hygiene wasn't all it could have been inside the brewery.

After 1989, beer flooded in from the West and sales plumetted. The local
pub trade stayed loyal enough to keep the brewery going. After a refit
of the brewhouse, the beer quality has improved tremendously. Sales
seem to have picked up and the Wartburg trademark to be of some value
again (I don't think the make of car with the same name did it much
good). Their beers aren't the best in the world, but they're reasonable
and certainly above average for the area. They also produce a fair range
of styles - pils, export, bock, schwarzbier - though the Helles, once
their mainstay in the off-trade, has disappeared. (Helles in general,
has had a poor time of it in the old DDR since re-unification.)

Their dark lager, Schwarzer Drachen is an interesting beer. Introduced in the
90's to take advantage of the popularity of Köstritzer Schwarzbier, it has
changed its taste over the years. Initially quite sweet, it's now very much in
the current trend of the style - dry and with quite a bit of malt bitterness.
It's odd to see a style becoming bitterer these days.

Eisenach PubsThere
have been many pub closures in the time I have known Eisenach, but it's still
got a perfectly respectable number for a town of its population. I've found listings
for over 70 licensed premises to serve the 45,000 inhabitants. The variation in
drinking establishments is good: Bavarian beerhalls, cosy pubs, traditional restaurants,
local bars.

I found that the standard of pubs was generally high. That there were plenty of
cosy, traditional places around. It's probably because, having been done out in
the last ten years, they missed out on all the horrible design disasters of the
70's and 80's. My only observation, though this could well have been because of
me visiting at early hours, was that there appeared a shortage of customers. I
was there outside tourist season, too, so this is most likely total crap that
I've just written. No doubt in Summer you'll be driven crazy by the crowds.

The overwhelming majority of pubs, to my great admiration, still get their standard
draught beers from the local Eisenach
brewery. Wartburg Pils and Schwarzer Drachen are on most bars and why not?
They usually offer beers from elsewhere too. It's only right that in a small town
the local brewery should provide the standard beer. Sadly, there are many towns
in Germany, especially in the East, where this is not the case.

Augustiner and Paulaner from Munich both have tied pubs in the town. You'll also
find beer from other Bavarian breweries - notably Kulmbacher and and Tucher. Products
from nearby parts of the East - Köstritzer, Radeberger and Sternquell - mean
that you can obtain an unusual mixture of beers in the town.Things are just slowly
reverting to how they were before Germany was divided. Bavaria isn't a great distance
away and there large brewers must always have has a presence here.

Personal MemoriesTo
the left you can see the Lindenhof, which is currently on the market and I am
sure will be attracting the attention of astute investors everywhere. Here is
one of the many locations in Eisenach that conjure up very personal memories.

It may look a wreck now, but in 1988 it was totally different - all the windows
had glass and there was draught beer. Inspirational design and sophistication
weren't words that cropped up the HO's mission statement. Lindenhof took this
corporate philosophy to the absolute limit. Today it's possible to peep at the
bar inside through some of the smashed boards and, despite the vandalism, it's
not looking that much worse than when I last had a beer there in 1988. The outside
hasn't deteriorated considerably, either. It looks as if someone might have even
tidied up the garden since the old days.

If you're thinking that's the grip this pub has on my throat and mind, then you're
very wrong. The memory that will never fade from my mind emanates from my wedding
feast. Over the road at my in-laws house, we were having an after-reception party.
A half dozen of my friends and family were staying there for a few days around
the wedding. My father-in-law had bought in a barrel of Wartburg Pils, but was
worried that we would never get through it. Early in the evening of the wedding
day, we had just finished off the second barrel of Wartburg (ordered in emergency
after the first had run out after two days).

Lindenhof
was just over the road and the only pub in the district open at that time of day.
Great idea - we nip over there and buy a couple of crates of beer. After all,
this is the DDR and the price of a crate in a pub is the same as in a supermarket.
Even in a country where I had learnt to love the charming drabness of of the surroundings,
Lindenhof was drably charmless. The landlord - a scruffy, miserable git in the
best tradition of publicans totally unsuited for their profession - soon disappointed
us: they had no bottled beer. About the only drinks available were draught pils
and doppelkorn (and I suppose tap water, though I wouldn't have bet my left shoe
on them having running water that was drinkable). What a dilemna: beer a mere
50 metres away from a happy group of revellers, but nothing to transport it in.
Suddenly someone - I can't remember who, but he was a man of genius - suggested
we fetch a bucket and put 10 litres of draught beer in it.

Now, bar staff could be a fickle bunch in the DDR. Moving a chair from one table
to another could be considered as a capital offence. I was once scolded by a waitress
for reading a book at the table. Yet being asked to pull 20 beers and tip them
into a bucket was seen as a perfectly reasonable request. If you want to appreciate
what I mean by this, try doing the same in your local pub. Go in with a bucket
and ask them to fill it with beer. I bet you that they won't act as nonchalantly
as this bloke did.

The Bierstube is one of Eisenach's oldest pubs though, hidden away on
a sidestreet, you're unlikely to stumble upon it by accident. It has two rooms: the
first very much a taproom, behind it is a restaurant.

Cosy may be a cliché, but that is the best word to describe the atmosphere.
There are plenty of traditional feature - a kachelofen (enclosed coal oven), delightful
old panelling , a beamed ceiling and wonderful carved columns. Most of the added decoration
is beer related, mostly connected with Radeberger or Köstritzer.

Any
pub that has a well-entrenched line of middle-aged guys at the bar has to have the
word "local" pop up somewhere in it's description. They were very keen on
the Radeberger. It could be a subconscious effect on people of that age of the product's
former rarity. Or they could just prefer it to the Wartburg and I can't say that I
could put up too much of an argument against them.

Though one of the reasons for the continued existance of the Eisenacher brewery, which
survived the dark days after re-unification, is the loyalty of the local pub trade.
When western beers flooded the shops, enough of the landlords kept faith with the
town's brewery to keep it going.

Pride in the produce of your local area is a quality that I have always admired. It's
one of the many good attitudes of the French. You find it a lot in Germany, too. Around
re-unfication the former DDR had a bit of an identity crisis. Appreciation of the
local specialities (which were mostly available all through the communist time) has
returned and deservedly so. No-one would ever believe me when I said that the best
bread and sausage in Germany was to be found in Thuringia. The beer was usually pretty
good, too. I still swear (and my brother will too) that Mühlhäuser Pilsator
was one of the best beers I've had in the true Pilsner Urquell style (so not pils
- not that stuff that has the colour of urine - a beer with a bit of colour and body,
so some maltiness as well as a good finish of hops. The style - pilsator - has very,
unfortunately, not outlived the SED.

As
you can tell from the name, this is effectively a tied outlet of Munich's Augustiner
brewery. And there's absolutetly nothing wrong with that, Augustiner being the pick
of the big industrial breweries. It's on the edge of the town centre, about due West
of the Markt.

Now my memory may be deceiving me, but I seem to remember, during the late 1980's,
spotting a building with a plaster sign from a Munich brewery. I have a definite feeling
that it was this pub. I thought: "that's a tied house they'll never get back"
- how wrong I was.

Inside you've got yourself a typical traditional Bavarian beerhall, allbeit on a relatively
small scale. The walls are panelled, the floors wooden and the tables topped with
pine. There are plenty of old Augustiner posters (they produced some particularly
striking ones in the 20's and 30's) and steins to give the appropriate beery atmosphere.
It's all been done with a good deal of taste and has created a old-fashioned, cosy
boozer whose young age it would be impossible to guess. A genuine addition to the
town and better than any pub they used to have.

The main bar is L-shaped, with the short side along the street, which is faced by
the bar counter. There are a couple of other rooms used for functions. It's another
one of those pubs that stretch back so far that the restricted frontage on the street
can be xery deceptive.

The beer selection may be small and bizarrely (perhaps my German isn't as good as
I thought and the waitress misinterpreted my question) includes no bottles, but there
is Edelstoff, one of my all time favourite Spezial style beers. The food is a mixture
of Bavarian and Thuringian dishes - not a bad combination if you don't have too many
waistline problems.

This hotel, restaurant, pub and probably a few other things as well
is just around the corner from where Mr. and Mrs. Bach used to live. You can still
see "Johann S rools OK" scratched crudely into the wall of the local bus
shelter. I think that 300 years is plenty long enough for the council to have got
around to repainting it.

You know when you're in Eisenach's "Bach quarter" (young Johann's grafiti
aside) because suddenly all the signposts for pedestrians are multilingual German/Japanese.
On a small square (though it's still a street) a little to the South of the Markt,
you'll find Am Bachhaus.

Forgive
me if I now lapse into my rather dull explanation mode. On entry, ignoring the reception
directly opposite you, if you turn left you'll come into the taproom. This is a square
room directly behind the front window, and has much of its space occupied by a U-form
bar. Most of the seating here is of the relaxing barstool variety. (My wife refuses
to sit on the things, saying they make her legs go numb. The times I've wished that
the same thing could happen to my brain, when I'm in some crappy pub - but I almost
forgot, isn't that why beer was invented?) But I digress, if we take a small stroll
towards the rear, then we'll pass through a series of larger restaurant and function
rooms.

The style is what I call "postwar German brewery tap". Out in the forest,
another few hectares of pine have felt the axe. A lorry-load of red tiles have been
carefully laid. There's not really much about the concept that you can fault. I've
been in such places from Düsseldorf to Munich, via Cologne and Stuttgart. Even
the cleverest designer can't provide genuine ageing. You can fake it, you can buy
it by the yard and lay it out, but it will never be the real thing. The real thing
(a cosy, old-fashioned pub) evolves over decades or even centuries. You start off
with a basic idea, then just let time take it's course: things break, junk accumulates,
fag smoke gets deposited. There's no way to get this effect overnight (not convincingly
- see the Kartoffelhaus below). Here, they've got the basic material for a very pleasant
pub. With loving care, it could be somewhere to delight my grandchildren. Perhaps
if "Bomber" ("Butcher" or "War-criminal" would be a
more appropriate epithet) Harris hadn't been quite so conscientious in finding German
towns that would burn nicely, there would be more unspoilt old pubs.

There's seating for a couple of hundred, but at the unfashionably early time of my
visit, I was their only customer. So, as to the nature of the usual clientèle,
your guess is as good as mine. But - I'm going out on a limb here - it wouldn't surprise
me if the odd hotel guest popped in.

I'm sorry, but being the only person in the joint, there weren't a great number of
barstaff around whom I could ask. OK, I admit it: I did forget to enquire about the
bottled beers. An informed guess would be the Tucher
wheat beers.

If
ever a declaration of interest needed were needed, then that time is now. On this
spot, we celebrated my wedding reception and it will, accordingly, always (or at least
until my wife finally loses her patience with my irresponsibility) evoke within me
unique associations. You've been warned - don't expect Mister Rational to remain within
the audatorium for the duration of these paragraphs.

Then again, I wouldn't have recognised it if my father-in-law hadn't pointed it out
to me as he drove me into town. "Now, we'll have to go down this way, mate, 'cos
of the *ing one-way system in this *ing town. See that place there, gov? That's where
we 'ad the knees-up after you tied the knot, if I 'member it right." (My pathetic
attempt at argot is only my silly,inadequate my way to convey the spirit of of the
moment. The fact that he really is a taxi-driver is of no relevance here. (My god,
he is the bloke who drove me to the Schmitt brewery in Singen, an act for which I
will never forget him.) Memory is a fickle friend. I recognised countless other personally
totally meaningless landmarks in Eisenach, yet this very significant place sparked
not the slightest flicker of memory. My mind must have been on other things at the
time.

Now where were we? I was about to launch into my second apology, which is for forgetting
to photograph the exterior. I have a good reason for this, in pretty well all circumstances
other than these. You wouldn't believe how many photos I take in the course of this
grueling research. Even so, there are occasions on which I need to be economical with
the film stock So I've got into the habit of taking the exterior shot upon exit rather
than before entry. There are many dangers inherent in this approach: the light conditions
deteriorating whilst inside; not being conscious when leaving; forgetting.

My
usual reason for the delay in snapping away is fear of disappoinment. How many photos
sit sadly in my albums of pubs, unreported in these pages, who let me down. From the
outside everything looks good, so, whip out the camera, push the button and rush inside.
How similar, as Swiss Tony says, this experience is to "making love to a beautiful
woman". These chastising images of a charming appearance harbouring corruption
within, haunt every visit to my archive. Traumatised by these experiences, I have
become accustomed to capturing the wonderful pictures which grace these pages after
leaving, when I'm certain that we're talking about high class broad and not low-rent
hooker.

After all this prologue are you still reading? Do you care what this very special
hotel/restaurant/pub looks and feels like? I can't say that I'm not tempted to tell
you nothing at all. To let you peruse the the pics (sadly lacking one of the most
vital) and come to your own conclusions. But what is the point in me making all the
effort to produce these pages, if I can't force my bigoted and ill-founded opinions
down your throats? If you want to see how the exterior looks, the photo on the hotel's
homepage is better than I could have managed,
anyway.

A
lot has changed here since my brother gave his bestman's speech. In those days it
was a hospice (a sort of cheap hotel/restaurant, not the last resting place of the
terminally ill) owned by the protestant church. That's the half-timbered bit on the
corner. The restaurant is still retained in (as much as my irritating memory can recall)
its original form. The lump adjoining it is the hotel/bistro built when, as a weird
side-effect of privatisation, church property got sold off, too. You couldn't build
anything with even the vaguest of pretensions to hipness that didn't have a whiff
of post-modernism, so on the ouside that's what you get.

The new appearance had me fearing the worst. But I was sadly disappointed in my lack
of disapppointment with the interior. The bistro is (as you xcan see above) rather
swish but at the same time has a real sense of place, mostly through the thoughtful
use of old photographs. Bastards. Why couldn't you make a real pig's ear of it? For
goodness sake, almost everywhere else in the world they can manage disastrous conversions/extensions/renovations.
How come they didn't mange here? The desgner must have studied in the East - where
they taught trades poperly.

The beers? Well, nothing too out of the ordinary. Three of the draught beers are pils,
but, if you want a quick guide to former-DDR pils beers, this could be a fair crash
course. Bottled they've got Eisenacher
Schwarzer Drachen and the set of Franziskaner
wheat beers.

There's a beer garden at the back, by the way. And it's a hotel. course. Looks pretty
nice, too, but you would have to check their website for prices. I would suggest haggling:
the major tourist sources - the USA and Japan - are running dry at present, causing
a bit of a draught in the hotel trade.

It isn't only going to be the Einstein's amongst you who will be able
to guess that this pub is on the market place. It is, strangely, about the only straightforward
hostelry on the square.

Once inside, it's surprisingly diminutive given the width of the frontage. The chunky
pine furniture (I always thought of it as the HO rustic style) looks like it has been
kept over from the DDR days. But chaps, that dark green panelling, believe me; it
doesn't do the place any favours. It looks as if they've let a four year old pick
the colour scheme. And that's a four your old who can't name the colours correctly
yet. And had obviously chosen the paint by words. This can be great fun to observe
but, believe me, has limited charm.

You can't help thinking that they're not really making the most out of what they've
got here. They've got a great spot, you would need to have pretty poor eyesight not
to notice it. It's not pubby enough for hanging around in. I think that that with
a bit better layout, they could be on a winner. Note the typical design of the older
buildings in the town: the outer door opens onto a corridor, from which another door
lead into the pub. Couldn't have been keen on draughts.

There are two rooms- a tiny one by the entrance which joins onto a second deeper room,
with the bar counter at the rear. Behind the pub there is a small beer garden.

This
place had me, even armed with a very useful map showing its location, struggling to
find it. My advice is, look for the public library on Georgenstraße, go around
the back of it and there, amidst remnants of the city fortifications, you will discover
a half-timbered barn. Part of a farm that predates the founding of the town in 1150,
it reopened as a pub in 1987. If you pass the thing with the gothic tower in the photo
to the left, then you've gone too far and are headed into the uncharted (for me at
least) western outreaches of town.

Its name is taken from part of the wall close by, the "Storchenturm", whose
roof used to house a stork's nest. Though there's not that much of the tower left
nowadays, so didn't have romantic visions of gothic towers. You still can't fault
the spot, fronted by a shady beer garden and shielded from the road by neighbouring
buildings.

Inside, the half-timbedering is still visible, thoughthe rest of the décor
is fairly neutral and modern. Some halters and other examples of agricultural retro
are sprinklimg around just to make sure that you don't forget this was once a barn.
OK, I've got the idea. A simple sign saying "ex-barn" would suffice.

The beer list is the same as that of a great many pubs: Wartburg/"luxury pils"/Tucher
Weizen beers.

Before you start thinking that I've become a total hypocrite and am
now promoting theme outlets, I will give you my reasons for including this particular
establishment. It has a handy central location and some tasty beers that I didn't
find anywhere else in the town. Will that do?

I
felt obliged to give some sort of explanation before divulging that this is one of
a chain of potata-dish based pubs hhose name translates as"The totally Crazy
Potato". It sounds horribly like a German version of Spud-U-Like, but it's really
much better. Believe me, though the description I'm about to pass on to you may not
improve that image. I hope that those of you who have used my guides "out in
the field", will by now afford me a degree of trust (and if you don't, what on
earth are you doing still reading my junk?). I was strangely seduced by this seemingly
appalling epitome of all that is bad about the modern gastronmic world. I don't give
it that high a rating but, hey, for this style of eatery, it's the equivalent of three
Michelin stars.

Where I was immediately reminded of - for no particular reason - was the estate pub
nearest to wher I lived in West Swindon (the Swindon of the West). It's all the fake
internal architetural bits, perhaps, such as a tiled roof over the bar. There is one
room, though loads of twidly bits of alcoves formed from demolition salvage break
this up considerably. The "by the yard" old books on high shelves immediately
brought into my mind another 1980's Swindon monstrosity of a pub: the one closest
to my work. A combination of two design catastrophes - is the gestalt a masterpiece
of kitsch? Don't ask me. I just drink the beer and check if the bar staff know their
Aas from their Elblag.

Strangely, this mish-mash of historical débris is in a genuinely old building.
But, in a sort of mirri\or of the interior, a modern block of flats is adjacent and
actually extends above this house. Spooky, eh?

The beers include a very pleasant Mönchshof Premium Schwarzbier, the Weißbier
products of the Kulmbacher brewery in bottle and draught Sternquell,
which, sadly, is a poor shadow of its former magnificent self.

You'll
all be bored to death by me banging on abvout this yet again, but I do greatly admire
Paulaner for their chain of tied houses. I may have growing doubts about certain of
their beers (the dreaded hop-extract), but they do have some great boozers. When in
a new town and desperate, my first move is to check for the presence of a Paulaner
outlet.

You German experts may well have heard of Dresden's renowned Zwinger museum, part
of that city's distinctive skyline. Now, it's only while I was browsing through a
German kid's guide to castles (coincidentally in the bookshop on Eisenach's main shopping
thoroughfare Karlstraße), that I realised what a Zwinger was. It means "bailey"
- one of the outer walled courtyards of a castle. Whether the Zwinger in question
here is a reference to Wartburg castle (at the top of the hill up which Wartburgallee
winds) or Dresden is unclear.

Hotel Kaiserhof dominates a corner immediately in front of the only preserved tower
of the city wall. The style of the building is typical for the period called in Germany
"Gründerzeit", the age of rapid economic expansion preceding World
War One. It's a form of architecture I've got quite a soft spot for. OK, we're heading
into town from the station (another beautiful building from the same era) and the
fork at Kaiserhof gives you two options: up the hill to the castle; through the gate
into town. If you're on foot, going left is a bad option, unless your destination
is the brewery (at the bottom of the hill, on the left) or the castle, a chest-bursting
climb of a mile or two.

Where
were we? I remember - I was trying to tell you about this Paulaner pub. It's in basement
of the hotel, the main advantage of which is that it's completely sparated from the
hotel part of the structure. You can see the windows half sticking out from the pavement
in my snap above. Now there's a funny story about the semi-subterranean nature of
this boozer. I'm told that during periods when miniskirts were popular, seats close
to the windows were most favoured by young gentlemen. Despite their low elevation,
they found the outlook admirable.

At
some point I will eventually tell the more patient amongst you what it's like inside.
Well, not really any great surprises. There's a single L-shaped room in a typical
Paulaner style. Dark-panelled walls, pine tables and chairs. Hopefully my photo isn't
so dark that you can't get the idea without me using up any of my lyrical inspiration.
Slightly odd are the wiatresses who, true to Bavarian tradition, are clad in dirndls.
Unlike Bavaria, none of them looked like they were drawing their pensions yet. Got
the idea - it's almost like being in Munich (not, by any means, an unpleasant thought).
They're making a good attempt to hide the panelling with old photos and newspaper
clippings, but will need another year or two to complete the job.

One last point about the interior. Christophe, it defies the law of toilet symbols
you told me. The male and female figures on the bog doors are undisputably fat, yet
the toilets themselves are the epitome of modernity and cleanliness. I would go far
as to say, the best quality toilets I found in the town.

The food is a combination of Thuringian and Bavarian, which suits me just fine. Any
menu with a high dumpling quota scores highly with me. No argiments about either the
quality or quantity (this is Germany, after all) of the nosh.

Beer - well it can't come as much of a shock that they have a load of Paulaner ones.
I would steer away from their pale bottom-fermenting beers - the hop-extract taste
screws them up a treat. The Dunkles and wheat beers fare much better, being lightly-hopped.

I wouldn't pay too much attention to the address. What it really should
say is, "half way up a hill, in a forest, just outside town". I had the
good fortune

a) to have a father-in-law who's a local taxi driver
b) to be walking with the assistance of a crutch (it's a very, very long story that
I won't be sharing with you)

so I didn't have to walk up the hill like you will have to. Sorry, it's emergency
vehicles only.

"How could you have got the full appreaciation of the beautiful surroundings in the
Thüringer Wald national park, without putting in the work?" I hear you ask. Well,
getting a hour's peace away from the bloody kids, left me in a very appreciative mood,
believe me.

You're
no doubt getting impatient with these personal assides and would like a few more hard
facts. Here we go then. Sängerwiese is a fairly small pub/restaurant, in the middle
of a wood (ss I have already expalined), decorated in a folksy but simple manner.
So you're got the trademark check tablecloths and the slightly less grandmotherly
dead animal skulls hung above the wood panelling. There are too separate rooms in
addition to the DDR-style taproom.

The menu is stuffed with traditional Thuringian dishes (you'll be feeling stuffed
after many of them), including plenty of game. For those of you on a budget there
is a special menu that would put a smile on the face of the meanest miser. The "Ostalgie
Menu" conatains a selection of meals once common in DDR pubs. What makes especially
tempting is that not only are the meals are exactly the same as they were, so are
the prices. You can get a full meal for under 3 euros! It's amazingly good value.

You would be surprised how many portraits of Honecker, which used to hang in every
pub in the DDR, are still knocking around. (I have one myself, somewhere, but my wife
keeps taking it down and hiding it.) Quite often, as in this case, their location
isn't as respectful as in former times. But it's nice to think that Erich is still
keeping an eye on us. It was amusing to observe the efforts to whip up some sort of
personality cult over a bloke, let's face it, with less charisma than John Major's
underpants.

Ostalgie I interpret as a healthy phenomenon. In the immediate days after re-unificartion
everyone tried to pretend the previous 40 years somehow hadn't taken place. People
now feel safe to express fond memories of elements of the DDR period, without coming
on as some sort of unrepentant SED hard-liner. More and more DDR-memorabilia forms
an integral part of pub interior design. I don't know what West Germans make of it,
but it certainly brings a nostalgic tear or two to my eyes.

Also a small hotel with 6 double rooms. In the warmer months, there is a beer garden.